New Year? New Beginnings

​          With the new year upon us, it’s time to shift gears and restart the engine. Endings always precede new beginnings. New beginnings can generate renewed hope. Being able to keep the negative parts of our past behind us gives us room to expand our hopefulness for the new beginnings of a new year.
          Kelly’s boyfriend for the past two years broke up with her right before the holiday break from school. They had met in biology class in the 10th grade. They were assigned to be lab partners and Kelly splattered goo all over Roger’s shirt while she dissected that poor. little kitty. Roger had called her his kitten thereafter. He could have been really mad at her, but he was gracious and forgiving.
          “Now, in our senior year, he chooses to dump me for some sophomore bimbo who puts out more than me,” Kelly explained to me during her first therapy appointment with me.
          “I’m so sorry, Kelly,” I began. “Bummer. That was a crummy thing for him to do,” I paused, “The breakup came from out of the blue?”
          “Nah. We had been fighting more and more these past few months,” Kelly tapped her foot nervously.
          “So, what do you think that means? Could he have actually done you a favor? If he was cheating on you, then good riddance, right?”
            Kelly paused, sighed, and conclude reluctantly, “I guess so.”
          “And just in time to start a new year without the baggage of a less than fulfilling relationship. A new year and new beginnings,” I concluded, “Let’s find that hope.”
          Kelly stayed in my clinical care for three months. I introduced her to mentalligent psychotherapy (MPT). She embraced mindfulness to help her not go back to painful past events and focus on the present. Even with her pain of breakup, I used positive psychology to help her find gratitude for things and people around her. After processing her pain of being dumped, I used cognitive behavioral strategies to change negative events into blessings, behavioral prescriptions to expand her social networking, and therapeutic journalling to sort through all of her feelings and track her healing journey. By Spring Break, Kelly was in a new relationship and feeling like her better self.
          The healing journey you take with your patients is marked by treatment strategies of mindfulness, positive psychology, and cognitive behavioral interventions. The focus on mentalligence helps your patient use both the software (mental) of her brain and the hardware (intelligence) to shut down old, unhelpful pathways and secure new, healing pathways using the neurogenesis functioning of our brains.
          Kelly’s story and others come together in my new book, The Healing Journey: Overcoming Adversity on the Path to the Good Life. Buy your copy on amazonbooks.com at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CY9PQXMZ.
Blessings,
Dr. Jon

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